The Challenges of Integrating Behavioral and Neural Data: Bridging and Breaking Boundaries Across Levels of Analysis

Abstract

We describe here two approaches introduced by Abrahamsen (1987) that can be used by behavior analysts to interpret neuroscientific data. The first is a "boundarybridging" approach aimed at understanding the interdisciplinary interactions between the behavioral and the neural levels of analysis while keeping the two domains independent. When presenting the boundary-bridging approach, we describe neuroplasticity, a perspective that describes how changes at the brain level can be understood by examining behavioral factors. In the second part of the paper, we contrast two "boundary-breaking" perspectives: neuropsychology and behavior analytic neuroscience. In neuropsychology, localized brain activation is used to explain behavior. In behavior analytic neuroscience, brain responses are interpreted as behavior. We discuss the conditions under which brain responses can be considered behavior and propose that including brain responses within a behavioral framework may allow carrying out a more sophisticated and temporally detailed behavior analysis.

Coal Is Not Black, Snow Is Not White, Food Is Not a Reinforcer: The Roles of Affordances and Dispositions in the Analysis of Behavior

“…It asks that we take seriously the fact that motivating and conditioning operations do more than change the probabilities of classes of responses; they change the organism, the agent of those responses. Some of the correlates of the states underlying those changes are measurable, whether by galvanic skin response (Mowrer, 1938, demonstrated the power of such measurements in guiding the interpretation of behavior), cortisol, pupillometry, event-related potentials (Ortu & Vaidya, 2016 explore ways to integrate such neural and behavioral data), or questionnaire. Their measurement may provide a useful complement to histories of reinforcement, when those are available.…”

An Internal and Critical Review of the PEAK Relational Training System for Children with Autism and Related Intellectual Disabilities: 2014–2017

“…Neuroimaging as a measure of PEAK interventions effects In this review we have focused on practical goals of intervention but there is also value in considering theoretical questions that arise in conjunction with intensive intervention programs like PEAK. For example, there is no greater underexplored area of cross-disciplinary collaboration for behavior analysis than neuroscience (Ortu & Vaidya, 2016;Zilio, 2016). Although a few studies have been done examining the neurological correlates of various language training tasks such as stimulus equivalence (Dickins, Singh, Roberts, Burns, Downes, Jimmieson, & Bentall, 2001;Schlund, Cataldo, & Hoehn-Saric, 2008), to our knowledge none have done so using children with autism.…”

Single‐case experimental designs for behavioral neuroscience

“…Another approach, and possibly one of more interest to behavior analysts, is to investigate neurobiological variables as stimuli with reinforcing, punishing, and discriminative functions or as motivating operations that alter the reinforcing or punishing effectiveness of other stimuli (cf. Ortu & Vaidya, 2017; Thompson, 2007). Although some examples of this approach exist, they are far fewer than approaches to identifying substrates that mediate and/or modulate behavioral phenomena.…”